Holocaust denier launches bid for leadership

With a large number of its activists either in hiding or on some kind of police bail, one of the party's founding members has decided that he has had enough of Nick Griffin's leadership and has indicated that he will stand for party leader later in the year.This is another distraction that the BNP's leadership could well do without.

Nearly seventy years of age, Richard Edmonds used to be a powerful and controversial orator when he was the warm up act for the party's hard-line Nazi founder John Tyndall, when he formed the party in 1982. A rabid Antisemite, Edmonds used to own and run the BNP's headquarters in Welling, south London at a time when it was common for the BNP to march around the country handing out copies of the newspaper Holocaust News, a newspaper that denied that the Holocaust had ever happened.

Not that Nick Griffin should mind Edmonds’s views on the Holocaust too much, he's had plenty to say on the subject himself too when it has suited him. The once hugely popular Edmonds is sure to be firing plenty of his notorious vitriol at Nick Griffin at a meting tonight in Mottingham, south London, where party rebels' are meeting to hear Edmonds launch his campaign when they really and probably should all be out elsehwere around the country handing out leaflets.

The meeting, which is for members only, is being held by the party's Reform Group who have decided they do not even want to wait until after next week's election before declaring open warfare. With Adam Walker, the party's cheap purging officer apparently still missing in action, someone else from the party's Head Office will have to be at Mottingham train station at 7.00 tonight to hand out the suspension and expulsion notices that normally follow once people have attended anti-Griffin meetings.

Thanks to Nick Lowles at HOPE not Hate/Searchlight